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SO 228 - Sociology of Health and Illness

Introduction

This guide will direct you to resources to use for the completion of the health care financing/presidential candidate health care platform assignment. All of these resources can be accessed either on campus or remotely by entering in the S number on the back of your student ID.

If you need any assistance in using these resources or if you are having difficulty in locating information, please contact a reference librarian by either stopping by the reference desk or online through Ask a Librarian.

Research Basics

The reference librarians have created a group of Web pages named Library Research Guides, designed to help teach you the basics of library research and to introduce you to Geisel Library. On the Research Guides pages, you will find a one-page guide on Research Basics and a helpful guide about evaluating your Web sources, our guide on Evaluating Websites. Please take advantage of these resources.

Researching Health Care and Health Care Financing

Introductory Information

CQ Researcher CQ Researcher is an excellent place to get introductory information on hot button issues. In addition to providing in-depth overviews on social, political, and cultural issues, CQ Researcher reports also have invaluable bibliographies, recommendations for further reading, and a list of website resources. HINT: try entering in universal coverage or health care in CQ Researcher's search box to locate reports on your topic. There is more than one report available on that topic so make sure to explore them all.

See the list of search terms below, they will help bring up research, theory, and the politics associated with health care financing. Keep in mind that when using these search terms some publications term health care as one word (healthcare) whereas others keep health care as 2 words, you may need to do multiple searches in order to bring up all available records on your topic.

Presidential Candidate Positions

The following websites can be used to research presidential candidate platforms. Make sure to follow the links in these webpages to presidential candidate homepages-it is always important to understand what the candidates say they support before analyzing whether or not they are contradicting their platform statements. The websites can also be used to compare and contrast platforms. Make sure to check all of the websites, some have more information than others. Keep your eye out for links to streaming video and audio of candidate interviews and/or GOP and Democratic debates.

Campaign 2008 Health Care Website

Kaiser Family FoundationThe Kaiser Family Foundation's health08 website is "dedicated to covering the issue of healthcare in the 2008 presidential election;" make sure to check out the enormous amount of information on this website to get the full image of a candidate's position on health care financing.

Newspapers

You will need to use newspaper sources for 2 reasons: to research what candidates are saying about themselves and to obtain critical/objective analysis of how a candidate stands on particular issues. When searching for newspaper articles on particular candidates you will want to enter in a candidate's name and combine it with a health care keyword search (see the above list of possible health care related keyword search terms).

For example: obama and health care reform

huckabee and health insurance

The newspaper sources that I recommend you use for this particular assignment are:

LEXISNEXIS LexisNexis is known for their newspaper collection but they also have newswires, television and radio transcripts, and blogs available to search. There are many versions of LexisNexis, make sure you use the LexisNexis Academic version. You can also get to LexisNexis by accessing our databases by title list, make sure to select the first LexisNexis option listed:

For the purposes of this assignment, when you first access LexisNexis make sure to check the following boxes: